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Bert was mumbling to himself as he adjusted cracker packets around his morning coffee at the Mule Barn.

“Something wrong, Bert?”

“Not if you have some Old Fool pills for me, Doc.”

“Uh-oh. What happened?”

“Well, I’d been telling the Johnson kid some stories of the old days when I was guiding hunters, and I happened to mention I could sight in a rifle with only two shots.”

“You can do that?”

“Yes. So can anyone, if they have a cardboard box. So anyway, here I was giving the kid my spiel about sighting in a rifle with two shots and he said he’d like to see a demonstration.”

“Sounds fair enough.”

“Well, yeah, and I didn’t mind. I figure we owe it to the next generation …”

“Come on, Bert,” Dud said, “what happened?”

“Well, you know you get a solid bench rest and aim at the target and fire one shot, right? So then you get a cardboard box and notch it and use rocks or sand to anchor it solidly so you can immobilize your rifle and you set it up so the rifle can’t move and it is showing the exact same sight picture you used for the first shot.”

“I didn’t know about this,” Doc said.

“Simple, really. So you’re looking at the bulls-eye the way you did on the first shot, and without moving the rifle itself, you adjust the sights until they’re pointed at the bullet hole in the target. That’s it. You then remove the cardboard box, sight at the bulls-eye and shoot again. It should be dead on.”

“That makes sense,” Dud said. “So what went wrong?”

Bert said, “Well, we loaded up everything we needed: chair, table, box, bread wrappers full of sand, target, everything. Then we drove out to the gravel pit and set it all up, just right. Took quite a while. Finally we were ready, so I went over and unzipped my rifle case and pulled out my shotgun.”

“So how many of those Old Fool pills do you need, Bert?”

“All you can spare me, Doc. All you can spare.”

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